I don't really know what the world is like in the books, because I couldn't make it through the first one (and this was at a time when I was considerably less discerning in my reading material than I am now). From the Dragon article I guess it sounds like an okay-if-somewhat-vanilla fantasy setting, but there's not really enough meat there to really make it worthwhile in my opinion. You could get as much flavour just from the implied setting of any edition of the rulebooks themselves.

I'd say the same as Vile, yet for example Legend of the Seeker, which as a book didn't engage me at all, was IMO surprinsingly good and funny as a TV serie, so maybe the same could happen with Shannara.
Shannara IMO really didn't have much originality in the first book, but the subsequent books introduced much more interesting elements (as the fact that the world would be our own 2.000 years in the future, IIRC).
Therefore as a RPG setting it has its original plot and themes, so I suppose a DM willing to work on it could come up with something quite interesting...
Dragon 286 has 27 pages of material, which is something but probably not enough for a campaign... strange that a rpg was never made...
It seems there is an italian rpg by chat with manual and rules however http://www.landedishannara.com/

Allen Varney wrote:Just take stuff from Tolkien and change the names. That's what Terry Brooks did.

I have only read the first book in the series, Sword of Shannara, and that one is certainly very heavy on the Tolkien influence. I heard the books got better later on though. I assumed that meant they also removed themselves more from Tolkien?

Sturm: You make a good point, that a well made TV series offers an opportunity to remove some problems that the original material may have.

Just finished the first season of the TV show today. I must admit I rather enjoyed it. I think this could make for a pretty interesting RPG setting, especially if you use some of the concepts from the TV show such as making the post apocalyptic parts of the setting more prominent.